I'm gonna throw this out there:

If Meta is going to join the fediverse (or implement something with activitypub) there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop them.

It's an open protocol. They can use it.

The only thing we can do is force them to follow the AGPL and/or fork the code if they get crazy with change requests.

My hot take:

Biden has been the best President we've had in 30 years.

He's exactly who we needed when we got him. He got us out of Afghanistan. As much as a debacle as it was, he not Trump and not Obama pulled us out. His deft handling of the Ukrainian conflict where he used soft-power and influence to let the EU and NATO members come to decision to enact the super harsh sanctions themselves. Knowing that if the US pressed, they'd resist. It had to be their decision. He's continued to say and do all of the right things. His attempt to forgive student loans his huge. Some of the measures worked even if all of them didn't. He got the most meaningful infrastructure bill passed that I've ever witness. Neither Trump nor Obama could make it happen and Biden did it with a split Congress That infrastructure bill was also the most meaningful environment legislation that we've ever had That bill also paves the way for significant investment in our broad-band across the country Passed the Safer Communities Act ...actual gun related legislation since the Brady bill. Again, with a split congress. Gave us our first public defender SCOTUS justice. This might not seem like a big deal but I think its pretty significant given the amount of case law that exists that, so far, hasn't had a public defenders 'say' in it.

I could go on but I gotta go eat dinner.

People want to shit on Biden, but I actually like him. He's not perfect, but he's been insanely effective given everything he walked in to. Including him diligently and quietly rebolstering the executive branches that were gutted and had people leaving in droves in the last admin. Eg the Department of State. He's assigned quality folks into key roles and its making a difference.

I voted for him without hesitation because well, the alternative was terrifying, but I was not expecting much from him at all. He's surprised me.

edit: I literally can't figure out how to make this a list. Sorry for the wordblob.

All the drama and pisspoor management by spez aside, ultimately the way I used reddit is through RiF. To me, that's reddit. I can't stand their official app and their official website is horrendous.

They forced my app to close down so I guess that's that.

I stopped using RiF and consequently reddit in protest. I held out hope this was a shitty negotiation tactic by Reddit and they'd eventually back off somewhat. But they've tripled down on it.

This forced me to reevaluate my relationship with the platform and I decided to check out Lemmy kbin and mastodon. I also checked out some old forums I frequented before reddit took over.

I reinstalled a newsreader and set up RSS feeds for my favorite things.

Basically, I'm realizing I don't need reddit as much as I thought I did. I actually have enjoyed the fediverse,beehaw in particular, more. I never used Twitter but mastodon has really great content and engagement as well.

I'm not saying I'd never go back to Reddit. I probably would if RiF somehow survived, but reddits lost its luster for me and I don't trust it anymore. So why waste time actively participating there so I can have the rug pulled from under me again?

Reddit may not see a mass exodus like Digg or Myspace, but it's been poisoned and over time the rot will set in and it will fester. This will be the moment people point to as the turning point.

It feels like this fight is 5-7 years late. I am glad the EU actually tries to regulate on behalf of the consumer vs what the US has been doing lately(almost nothing), but the EU does it in a ham-handed way half the time.

I don't necessarily want a user replaceable battery on my phone. I prefer it not be chonky and I prefer it to be water and dust proof. All of those features impact me sooo much more than being able to change the battery.

Also batteries have come so far this past decade it almost seems like a non issue.

That was my take. I imagine most of the admins/mods of the larger instances are very busy these last few days. It will shake itself out over time. The thing thats really interesting about the fediverse concept is that something like this can happen--for better or worse.

I personally appreciate the level of curation and moderation being done here. I looked at the blocked list and even some of the names just skeeve me out. I dont want to have to deal with that, and if the mods here can see lots of trolls or bad content coming from particular places, I like that they would take action to deal with it.

Shoutout to The Dude for being responsive and receptive, but I wouldn't write off the lemmy.world admin yet.

Yep, and while working from home should never be in lieu of actual child care, cutting out 2-3 hours of commute time in each side and being able to help at lunch is HUGE.

Even if you still put your kids in daycare, you would still spend more time with them and it'd be less stressful if you were working from home. You can get a daycare close to your house vs on the way to work/near work.

I gained weight working from home :(

Even a boring day at the office with little "extra" walking had me close to 10k steps.

I can go for a 2 mile walk everyday I work from home and barely get 8k it seems.

Plus ironically I eat more garbage. When I was at the office there were decent healthy options like salads and stuff. At home...it's way to easy to grab a box of wheat thins and eat the whole thing.

I truly can't imagine a world where they do it in secret. They'll advertise it and slap their branding all over it.

He's not asking how to spot it. He's asking who gets to be the ultimate arbiter of fakeness?

Even reputable news sources make mistakes. Sometimes their sources give bad information. Maybe they reported in good faith, but with bad information?

What happens when they work around it by JAQ-ing off. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

It's also incredibly important to note that they are making this explicitly opt-in. So none of that 'dark pattern' mumbo jumbo with the tyranny of the default--where companies opt you in and most users dont realize they have to opt-out.

All in all they are going about this the right way it seems. The devil will be in the de-identifying technical details imo.

I read this on Daring Fireball the other day:

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

  -Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;

 -Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and

 -When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former

A lot of the hardcore advocates of free software get, understandably, upset when they see masses of people spout FREE software! or opensource software...then not give a flying fuck about what that actually means. The quote above is pretty accurate imo.

I think half of the people using free(as in libre, not gratis) software are doing it because its free (as in cost). Not because they care about the "four essential freedoms": (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Because, well, see the quote above. Most wouldn't even know where to start. They just want to use the software..and not pay for it. They aren't opposed to closed, non-free software.

So if you truly believe in the philosophy behind free software, you'll start getting pretty opinionated as you see people co-opt, distort, and disregard key tenants of your philosophy. Even looking at some of the responses to this post, you can see people misusing the definition of free and/or not being precise with their language (which for something like this, can completely change the meaning).

This is a fantastic article: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

It gives a good short history of how we got here.

I went to a talk at the air and space Smithsonian museum in DC where Mike Brown talked about his hypothesis that "Planet X" is out there. Hes done some brilliant math and research and can show that a planet should be there, he just has to find it.

This was years ago and I haven't kept up with it but I know he was trying to get time on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii to try and find it.

This sounds like very similar hypothesis-es? (Hypothesii ?)

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/hypothetical-planet-x/in-depth/

I wish the article included a map of the gains. It's tough to visualize/understand the progress without it.

got away from ageism

No way, old man winter!

Just kidding! I remember being on a gaming forum back in the early 00s and having a couple of "old" guys on (in their 30s-40s). We'd always give them shit, but at the same time looked up to them and thought it was cool they were still gaming.

They also had great perspective and wisdom to share with us teenage idiots.

Now I get to be the 'old' guy in my 30s. It's fun to engage with the younger crowd, and not dismiss them because of their age, because the younger generations have interesting perspectives too. I'm like paying it forward.

My take is that "L"LMs are already old news. I think targeted or limited data-set language models are going to be the next wave.

I think this partly because very few people can do LLMs at the scale of Microsoft and Google so I think smaller firms and people in their garage are going to aim their sights on smaller targeted data sets with a eye towards factual accuracy.

And then maybe link them/daisy chain them together. I hope there is this unix philosophy for models where they do one thing well but you can 'pipe' data from one to another.

The only drama I've seen on it is a few idealists on other instances complaining about it and these posts.

I actually like beehaw more as an instance because of what they've done.

Nilay Patel had a great article when Elon bought Twitter. One of the key take aways I tend to agree with is:"The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works."

I love being part of a community and being able to discuss and debate. But ultimately I want to do it in a place where I don't feel creeped out, skeevy, or where I am getting harassed or threatened.

I value the moderation. I value the curation. I want the mods to defederate if they see an influx of trolls, shit posts, or sketchy content from a particular instance.

And you know what, I'll be annoyed when they block something or someone I don't think they should have.

The reality is: the fediverse is designed for this sort of thing. Theyve been very transparent and they will re federate when the tooling is better. I have no reason to doubt that.

I see this as growing pains and nothing more.

Haha! I didn't even notice the avatar. So I guess maybe ageism and accidental sexism are still a thing here?

My bad :)

The "right to be forgotten" rules are, with all due respect to the EU regulators, pretty shortsighted.

I think the initial "right to be forgotten" lawsuit that Google faced from that Spanish guy-- where he claimed bankruptcy years prior. People( potential lenders?) kept finding that information online through google searches. He sued to have Google remove those sites from the index. He won and the Spanish Judge told Google they had to remove those results from searches.

But it didn't change that the information was still on each site. Those sites, the ones that actually held the information didn't get sued, just Google.

It also opened the door for oppressive governments covering up human rights abuses or hide other information they dont want widely available.

Google appealed and won: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49808208

I also want to point out that this Spanish guy's situation is very different from "posting publicly on social media". He was getting written about by others and the courts eventually said "no, this can stand. This information should remain available". So I imagine, public statements made by an individual certainly wouldn't qualify to be forgotten.

At the end of the day, to me, this is a technical decision not a privacy one.

This is exactly the type of friction that made RiF my "reddit". It's not even close to the same experience and it's painful.

100% but I believe these are typically locked down to one domain, and in this case its not.

At least thats how I understand it. So I guess the article is a little misleading in that sense, but the net effect is the same. You have carte blanche access to the web, via android system webview, thats acting as a de-facto out-of-band browser. So its misconfigured or not locked down, which means you can use it effectively as a "hidden" browser.

Yea, I don't have a problem with a company, whose service I use, try to sell additional services or create a paid tier that basically pays for me to use it for free.

I like discord. The name change hubbub was..a nothing burger. If people want to pay for extra emojis or whatever for their server....cool? How does that impact me?

Okay, so I am gonna check those two off my lists of ways I want to die.

James Cameron seems like a really smart dude.

That's a really solid point. I guess it depends on the phone. The low end Android market probably isn't holding up as well as the high end or iphones.

My pixels seem to last as long as it takes for me to pay them off before they just black screen and brick themselves. I had 3 pixel threes, since two replaces under warranty and the last one died a few weeks outside.

Meanwhile my wifes iphone was just fine. She only changed because her dad got the latest and greatest and handed down this last-year model to her. So I could see batteries being an issue over time.

I used it to help a friend with a cover letter for a job. I pasted in what my friend had written and asked if it could make it sound better. It literally just made up stuff to make it sound better.

Ubuntu is the typical go-to.

Id recommend pop!_os personally.

Fedora is another great option.

The reality is, as a new Linux user, you'll probably hop around quite a bit. I say go for it! Try out everything you want.

People keep posting that, but where that specific example breaks down is that xmpp requires network effects to work. You need your friends to use the same system and it's more person to person interaction.

They have a lot more leverage because if you want to talk to your friend, then you have to use their setup.

Link aggregators, forums, reddit, and lemmy/kbin work differently. Your friends use them but you probably don't interact directly.

It's about the community.

And I'm not really sure how Meta changes that. They are creating a thing for their Instagram users (using activitypub protocol??) and they are planning on allowing people to move their mastodon accounts over to their thing. Their thing that doesn't federate. It's a walled garden.

Those people, if they move, are required to follow Facebooks terms of service. Well no shit? You just moved to Facebook.

What's being forced on anyone?

If they "enhance" the protocol and attract people to their service...then what? You can't stop people from using a different service. Tildes could take off and pull people from the fediverse. Tildes could offer a service to import your account. How does that impact the rest of the fediverse??

Just keep using this. Build your community and carry on.

I think I'd feel less overwhelmed if these games had hand-holding features. I recall Fable and Fable2 having some features that basically highlighted the route for you or hinted at which way you should go.

I get that open world is supposed to let you explore freely but if you are doing a specific task..help me get there!

I've started and stopped Witcher 3 3x. I just couldn't get into it. I realized I kept getting stuck and not able to figure out where I was supposed to go. I got frustrated and gave up.

The part where he says it's "mostly white people which is unfortunate" was an odd thing to say.

Doesn't make white people feel very welcome I'd imagine.

I see your Stephen Merchant, and raise you a Stephen Frye.

I feel like Wave was ahead of its time and they should bring it back.

He's the embodiment of "you're not wrong, you're just an asshole"*

I understood the intent, but words mean things and phrasing matters. As written, it doesn't seem welcoming or inclusive. They phrased the other sections much better--(which almost makes it seem more targeted even though I sincerely doubt it is)

"We don't have as much diversity as we would like in this area, so in an effort to cultivate a richer community, we'll need to do more analysis and outreach. We are open to ideas!".

The reality is: you can't force diversity. You can only make an environment where its welcome and encouraged--and you should be welcoming to everyone. Obviously this rubbed some folks the wrong way.

As an aside: it's also a little short sighted to assume that bucketing people in a "white" group means they aren't diverse in their own right. I'd imagine there is quite a diverse makeup of "white people" on here-- people from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere who all have very different perspectives, cultures, and norms that they bring to the table.

I want to throw AntennaPod out there for anyone looking for a solid android podcast app. Its FOSS as well for those that care about that sorta thing.

https://antennapod.org/

It's like raaaaaa eeeeeee aaaaaain

A couple of things: It sounds like you are assuming I am white.

This response doesn't seem all that nice or inclusive. Calling someone with an, ironically, slightly different opinion than you (read: diverse), fragile and sensitive seems to be counter to the community you are trying to build here. Right? Am I crazy?

I think we need to strive to have an environment where we can have open, honest, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations about all of this stuff. Being dismissive of it as "white fragility" isn't productive or helpful.

As I said in my initial comment, I understand the intent of that section of the report, and I think more diversity is better than homogeneity, but the way that information was conveyed, and almost specifically that information, seems unwelcoming. For what its worth, I very intentionally joined Beehaw vs any other instance because I truly appreciate what you are trying to do here. So hopefully you take this in the manner it is intended: (hopefully) constructive criticism and food for thought.

Most companies that are going back to the office are STILL HAVING VIRTUAL MEETINGS. The hybrid environments ABSOLUTELY are. So you are getting all of the shitty aspects of going into the office and all of the downsides of not-in-person collaboration. It's the worst of both worlds.

When you ask an employee to wake up an hour earlier, spend an hour in traffic, to pay for parking, to sit in a 'hotel cube', to get on a virtual meeting that they could have done at home...you are absolutely going to have people leave your company.

The data on people equating lack of flexibility with a 2-3% paycut seems incredible low to me.

I think its a much more significant impact than that. I know people who have basically taken a 20% paycut (lost their cost-of-living adjustment) to move to a different state--doing the same job remotely. That's basically a way of saying flexibility/remote work is work 20% to them.

They are called pavement princesses and mall crawlers.

Lifted trucks and jeeps that have never even seen a gravel road

I dont know that its how they brand themselves, but Pop!_OS is a fantastic linux gaming distro.

Its based on Ubuntu, but they do several very important things: they update/patch the kernel with the latest drivers and goodness and provide the latest nvidia proprietary drivers. So you get the stability and durability of ubuntu + newer kernel support which means things like much more current mesa drivers (for radeon cards).

I've been using it full-time for 3 (or 4?) years now. I technically have my PC dual booting with Windows for gaming reasons, but since the steamdeck took off all of the big games I want to play are available on linux. I've logged into windows exactly 2 times and that was to run updates.

Pop has been rock solid and turned out to be a great gaming OS.

As crappy as googles results seem to have gotten over the last year, anytime I try to set my browser default search to anything else, I end up irritated and going back to Google for 50% of my searches(maybe even more ). Bing is fairly decent, but if the goal is privacy...

The alternative search engines just always lack the context--ehich presumably google has from me by pilfering my information for the last 2 decades.